IIRC multiple towns were attacked. if each of these witnesses were from a different town, there might be multiple attackers, with just one hitting each town.
alternately the thing might be using magic to alter its appearance and abilities for each attack, to hide its true nature.

Well, I never considered it that way. I just figured that he could project a different image into the mind of several different witnesses at the same scene. In other words, you and I witness a person doing something and you see a 6’6″ tall wolf and I see a 5’3″ tall mouse and a third person sees a 6’0″ tall dragon. That’s what I was saying but, I guess that’s the same thing you were saying.

In this case they could be perfectly sane, and telling very accurat accounts. Which just complicates things even further when magic is involved. Theres illusion magic, shape shifting, mental projection, and with a mage the apparent abilities can easilly be in one package. Richard from another comic could do fire and ice, and frequently use dboth. I know several other mages that had a wide range of spells at thier disposal.

This shows one of the significant problems with trying to get accurate information from people that ‘witness’ something. In the case of these people, their memories can easily be ‘colored’ because of the traumatic aspect of what they saw. And made worse from being influenced by anything they hear from someone else that may have seen, or thought they saw something. Things can be made even more difficult if you get a someone that only wants to be ‘important’ and report what they ‘saw’. Getting accurate information from can only be done by someone that is trained in getting information from those that have actually witness something.

Like said earlier: if you have a short skinny person and a tall muscular person describe an average person, the description will be different; to the short skinny person, they were tall and fat; to the tall muscular person, they were short and thin